DOJ Cyber Security | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: Jim Bispo's column appears in the Beaufort Observer.

    Have you been wondering why Eric Holder and his Justice Department has been too busy to investigate a lot of troublesome things going on in our Government or respond to congressional inquiries in any kind of reasonable time frame?? DOJ seems too busy to respond to questions about its own goings on; ATF "gun running"; NSA "spying"; IRS "misbehavior"; or VA "cooking the appointment books" and a lot of other things.. Surely their inability (unwillingness??) to respond has to be because they have been too busy trying to catch some Chinese hackers (all of whom are in China) trying to infiltrate computer systems belonging to a number of U.S. firms in an apparent hope of bringing them to justice in the U.S. (So where are the NSA, ASA, DIA and any other government organizations dedicated to this kind of clandestine thing when you need them??) Of course investigating the GW bridge fiasco (which one would think is a purely NY/NJ Port Authority concern) may also be contributing to their "busy work".

    Actually the list of those being "protected" from hackers by the DOJ is rather interesting. It includes U.S. Steel Corp., Westinghouse, Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies, the United Steel Workers Union and Solar World. I hadn't heard of "Solar World" before, but I would have thought that the others' IT capability sufficient to protect themselves from hackers. Apparently they need the DOJ to take care of them. Do you suppose it could have been the "Union" that got DOJ interested - not because they couldn't take care of it themselves, but because spending taxpayer money for union purposes is surely always better than spending Union money. That way they can afford more "minimum wage" T-shirts, printed signs and pickets to wear and carry them. I suppose we can only wonder if they were paying all their "protesters" the same $15.00 per hour they were demanding from others. Hmmm...

    In any case.. Now we have the goods on at least five of these Chinese culprits and they are on the "Most Wanted" list - and we have announced it to the world. Wow!! Good work, gang...

    Now that we have "fingered" these bad guys, how long do you suppose it will be before we can bring them to justice?? Short answer - somewhere between forever and a day - and never. They are in China and apt to remain there...

    But wait a minute. Didn't we not long ago convict one PFC Bradley Manning for compromising our National Security and then wring our hands when Edward Snowden did the same thing with his release of information about our clandestine operations??

    So how is Eric Holder's pronouncement concerning Chinese "hackers" any different than what Manning and Snowden did?? It isn't.

    It seems to me that we have let the cat out of the bag about our capabilities. Now the Chinese know what we know about what they are up to (their protestations of innocence not withstanding.). Do you suppose that now that the dauntless crime fighters at the Justice Department have exposed the bad things that the Chinese hackers are up to, they will cease and desist?? Or, do you suppose that they will more likely have to figure out some more sophisticated "tricks"?? I vote for the latter. Believing that the expose´ of the Chinese hacking is going to force them to stop is kinda like believing that taking someone's driver's license away is going to stop them from driving.

    Actually, the Holder scenario doesn't sound much different than when someone spilled the beans that we were listening to Osama Bin Laden and his troops communicating over their satellite phones. Do you suppose they continued using the satellite phones after that information became public?? I don't think so...They switched to more secure protocols which made it considerably more difficult to keep track of what they had going on.. We may detest all the terrorists, but that doesn't mean they are stupid. You would think that we should have learned something from our experience with them by now, but it sure doesn't seem so. It would seem that with this administration politics nearly always trumps reason and logic and frequently our national interest.

    Now we are being told (AP article in the 5/21/2014 Tampa Tribune) that the Chinese used simple "ruses" to hack US Companies. Sounds like they were using much the same tricks that hackers often use on the unsuspecting among the ordinary populace. "Click here" to open an attachment or to see something or to receive a freebie - and the next thing you know is that your machine has a virus or some other unpleasant affliction. Boy, talk about the degree of sophistication that it took to uncover those ruses...

    Of course, what Eric Holder has done may be even worse than exposing to the Chinese how sophisticated we are. Instead we are exposing to them how unsophisticated we are... It's hard to say which admission is more damaging.

    When we find ourselves in a situation like this one, it seems to me that the best thing we could do is keep our mouth shut. "They" don't need to know that we know. And "they" don't need for us to confirm we are looking at their shenanigans. Better we leave them suspecting that we are monitoring what they are doing and leave them wondering if they are right or not. Surely, this kind of thing is not being used to divert the national conversation from all the serious things going on (or not going on) in the administration... Hmmm...

    D'ya Think??